Building a TED Talk: Organizations and Anxiety

How five decades of recital and concert anxiety amplified a century of family history

I gave my first TED talk at TEDxRutgers a few months ago and the video has been posted

This talk grew out of an idea I had proposed for a corporate TEDx event that was a bit raw and far-ranging.  I’ve been thinking about anxiety and how it is perceived by individuals as a lack of respect and control. That starting point was extruded that to frame organizational mechanics – most of which we call “passive aggressive behavior” and are other outward aspects of feeling conflicted about control, credit, cost and content. 

I spent about two months assembling content, capturing anecdotes, caramelizing them into tangy headlines, and then finding images – navigating copyright issues – to better express them visually.   Two weeks out from the talk, I had transcribed my ideas into a script that was sent to the student organizers for review and approval .

Feedback from the organizing team was “focus more on telling your story” and I realized while I had a lot of ideas in the slides, they were comments on large organizations and not particularly my experiences that I was charged to convey.   I went into edit and rewrite mode.   I’ve experienced this cycle of “let’s do this piece” followed by “this is harder than I thought” racing into “why did I agree to this” and sliding downhill to “I’ll never quite get this” with each of the music recitals I’ve done over the last decade.

What I found with my music recital experiences is that the last week before the performance was when I’d put my own touches and styles on the piece.  For the TED talk, I turned to comedy-like callbacks about my Grandfather Herman and his general store and my own bass playing, tying more complex ideas back to my personal history.   

I’d like to believe I imparted my personal lessons learned: organizations cause anxiety and display it as a defect.  The way out is through creativity and avenues in which you can exert control even if it is to structure your collection of baseballs.

How I Got There:

There is a long reading list that informed and influenced my experiences, my behaviors and my talk:

John Scalzi’s view of privilege, a piece that I share probably more than any other, and now 11 years old it rings more loudly and more necessary than when first posted. 

Olga Kazan’s book “Weird” gave me language about “otherness” and her stories of being a Russian immigrant in East Texas are a century forward and yet highly parallel to those of my grandparents.

“Craphound,” the lead short story in Cory Doctorow’s “A Place So Foreign” lends its name to his website and gets an  explicit quote in the talk.   When you can have everything, what’s left to control, besides the way in which you curate your interstellar life?   I’ve re-read this about half a dozen times and sniffle each time.

Claude Steele’s “Whistling Vivaldi” is another book that I frequently quote and share, as it explores how otherness can be thrust upon us.

Annie Duke’s books on decision making, especially “Quit” and “How To Decide” are some of the best frameworks for improving your sense of control and gaining the most valuable respect of all: self-respect of good current and future decision making.

It all began with Fred Boyd’s “The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book,” first loaned to me by my cousins and then acquired before it went out of print the first time, only to be lost during one of half a dozen moves and purchased used for a second time.  It was the book that made baseball minutia – and collecting in general – seem less “other” and more fun, and it is the common thread woven through the talk.